Articles Archive for July 2008

They are planning a vacation together. They have been planning for months.
She likes the mountains. He likes the sea.
She says if they go to the seaside she would like to watch the waves from a boatdeck. A cruise boatdeck. She hasn’t worn a bathing suit in ten years. He speaks of snorkeling, and sunshine, and baking on white sands. She says sand gets in places that itch.
He is enamored of cathedrals. She prefers cafes. Cathedrals, she says, are dank with tombs of …

Once again, the “Web 2.0″ Candidate is being scrutinized by using…Web 2.0.
The Republican National Committee has launched a suprisingly functional Facebook parody titled Barackbook, which goes into Sen. Obama’s deep links with various Chicago radicals, convicted felons, and Iraqi financiers.
The site is not all that deep, but serves the purpose of easily navigating the tangled set of relationships in Cook County Politics.

(T)his bucolic scene in his father’s village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, the Evening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.
At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands lining the dirt streets of …

Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he’s “been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them.”
And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he “showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own …

As the rest of the media concentrates on Sen. Obama’s “historic” and “healing” trip to Europe, we will continue to publish the news from the 7th Ward of Chicago, in Sen. Obama’s former Illinois Senate District:
Aggravated assault: Handgun
Place: Street. Reported at 11:14 p.m. on July 17, 2008.
Aggravated battery: Domestic battery: handgun
Place: Residence. Reported at 1:18 p.m. on July 17, 2008.
Narcotics: Possession of heroin (white)
Place: Vehicle (non-commercial). Reported at 4:15 p.m. on July 17, 2008.
Theft: From building
Place: Barbershop. Reported at 9 p.m. on July 18, 2008.
We welcome the national and international …

If Chicago can raise $50 million a year using 100 cameras to catch red-light runners, I’m for the city putting in another 100. Or more. Same for the suburbs that are thinking about putting in the cameras.
Yes, we’re supposed to feel sympathy for motorists who race through red rights, as if they’re a picked-on species that is being victimized by the money-hungry Daley administration.
It’s not fair; it’s not constitutional, the ticketed public whimpers. Some lawyer, of course, has filed a class action suit, protesting—what?—a motorist’s right to speed through a …

Rev. Senator Meeks of Illinois plans to bus thousands of truant CPS students* to Winnetka’s New Trier School District and enroll them in the affluent northern suburb.
Given the cost of gassing up the buses need to take his expected ‘thousands of children,’ Rev./Senator Meeks is going on the hip in a huge way to bring focus on what he believes to be a two-tiered funding inequity in how education dollars are spent.

he vacancy rate for industrial real estate in the Chicago area climbed to its highest level in 14 years in the second quarter as the ailing U.S. economy has companies curtailing investments — leaving more warehouses and factories here empty.
The vacancy rate pushed higher for the third straight quarter to 9.38%, up from 9.11% in the first quarter and 8.58% in the second quarter last year, according to a new report by Colliers Bennett & Kahnweiler Inc., a Rosemont-based commercial real estate brokerage.

President Bush is poised to sign the housing and Fannie Mae bailout bill, after the Senate passed it with 72 votes on the weekend. But an underreported part of this story is that Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to allow a vote on Republican Jim DeMint’s amendment to bar political donations and lobbying by Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac.
This is a rare parliamentary move for a body in which even Senators in the minority party have long been able to force votes. The strong-arm play illustrates how politically powerful …

Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged today that he had failed to understand how much violence would decrease this year in Iraq, but he contended that President Bush and Sen. John McCain, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential candidate, had made the same mistake.”
Well, the difference would be that the surge was even more successful than McCain anticipated. Not really the “same mistake” as trying to do everything to prevent implementation and completion of a successful strategy.